Jasper johns numbers series#

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973 and the American Philosophical Society in 2007. Johns has received many honors throughout his career, including the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. At multiple points in his career, his work has held the title of highest known price paid for an artwork by a living artist. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other common objects and signs, such as targets, maps, letters, and numbers. Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. This image illustrates Johns's early technique of painting with encaustic over a collage made from found materials such as newspaper. And I’m thinking of the images of vaudevillian skeletons, and a weeping soldier, and spiral nebulae that have preoccupied the artist of late.Flags, Numbers, Maps, Stenciled Words, TargetsĪbstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, pop artĭetail of Flag 1954–55, Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Johns appears as a blank gray shadow in each picture.) I’m thinking of the “Catenary” paintings of the late 1990s, each with a string draped on its surface, an emblem of gravity at work, perhaps a thread of life.

Jasper johns numbers series#

I’m thinking of “The Seasons” (1985-86), a series about delight in the world, memory, and clocks running down.

I’m talking about paintings like the 1982 “Perilous Night,” named for a Cage composition, hung with casts of bruised arms, and made on the eve of AIDS. These prints, composed of unstable patterns of crosshatched parallel lines, are collectively titled “Usuyuki” or “light snow,” the name of an 18th-century Kabuki play that Johns has described as being about “the fleeting quality of beauty in the world.” Awareness of that reality has always been part of his art, and is especially pronounced in his late art, which is the work I’ve come to love most, precisely because it’s not arcane or hermetic it’s fully felt and reality-grounded. But the real glory is a selection of abstract prints Johns made between 19 with Japanese artists in Tokyo and New York (he is seen in action in an accompanying film by Katy Martin). One of his most celebrated assemblage paintings, “Watchman,” from 1964, is a centerpiece of this gallery, along with two works that incorporate a photograph of the artist, the only one that appears in his art. The corresponding installation in Philadelphia documents another important place in Johns’s life and art, Japan, where he traveled in 1964 and where, thanks to artists he met there, his interest in printmaking intensified. This picture appears at the Whitney in one of the retrospective’s most overtly biographical installations, titled “South Carolina.” After the breakup with Rauschenberg, Johns retreated to a beach house in his home state, and there his work began to lighten up, as evidenced by the 1964 “Studio,” a mural-like painting that incorporates a full-size imprint of a screen door, an image of a palmetto frond, a brush and a string of paint-spattered beer cans - real ones - dangling from its surface. Another elegiac 1961 picture, “In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O’Hara,” takes its title from a lament on lost love by a gay poet who was a friend of Johns and an art-world fellow traveler.